National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) A Health Equity Website for Education and Social Networking Opportunity Number: RFA -OD-09-004 Convincing evidence of the importance of the social determinants of health and health inequity continues to be documented. Relatively few students and even fewer health practitioners, however, receive training in taking action. Healthy People 2010, with health equity as a goal, does not include objectives on how to achieve it. A pressing need exists to put this knowledge about the underlying determinants of health inequity into practice. The proposed project goal is to design and implement a large-scale, comprehensive, multi-media Health Equity Website, with two basic integrated functions that connect knowledge to action. The first features a learner-centered, interactive curriculum to educate the current and future public health workforce about health inequity and ways to address the social, political and economic inequalities at its roots. The second, linked to the first, is to serve as an ongoing learning community for researchers and practitioners to share experience and knowledge. With a method based on popular education and engagement, the project will harness the power of "next generation Internet" (termed Web 2.0) tools associated with user-generated content, to build capacity for easy and inexpensive collaboration among students, practitioners, and researchers through social networking technology. With this technology, the study team will develop a framework and methods to identify and measure the influence of social and political processes locally that repeatedly generate negative outcomes in the social determinants of health. It will share that knowledge with colleagues and researchers on the site. Our vision is a public health workforce that a) grasps how "social, economic and political systems structure the possibility for healthy or unhealthy lives and how societies create the preconditions for the production and transmission of disease", and b) transforms public health structure and practice to act on those systems to eliminate inequity in the distribution of disease.. National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) A Health Equity Website for Education and Social Networking Opportunity Number: RFA -OD-09-004 This project is relevant to public health in at least three ways: First, public health practitioners often functioning in isolation from colleagues or researchers on the deeply rooted sources of health inequity, will be able to establish a learning community where all participants contribute and share their ideas, knowledge, and experience as well as engage in regular dialogue. Second, health practitioners will be better prepared to develop effective strategies related to social change-acting on the forces that generate negative outcomes in the social determinants of health-instead of endlessly remediating the consequences of health inequities. Third, health practitioners will be capable of realizing the Assurance function in public health by developing more effective policies and practices.